Zimbabwe:Rainbow Tourism Group Mulls Expansion

Listed hospitality group Rainbow Tourism Group is aggressively looking for expansion opportunities on projected growth in room demand after recent political developments that have brought a new ray of hope into the local market&comma; CEO Tendai Madziwanyika has said&period;

He projects Zimbabwe could in a year's time struggle to meet room demand&period; With a lot of caution and emphasis on value creation for its investors&comma; Mr Madziwanyika said&comma; the group has appetite to occupy space created by growing room demand&period;

Zimbabwe lagged behind global tourism growth in the past two decades and missed its opportunities to double its room stock&period;

"Meanwhile&comma; as a company&comma; we are aggressively looking for expansion opportunities because that is the way to go&period; We definitely need to expand because we have a deficit in terms of hotel infrastructure&comma;" Madziwanyika told The Herald Business on the sidelines of its RTG Gateway launch on Thursday&period;

Mr Madziwanyika projects increased demand for Zimbabwe's tourism product on renewed interest from a deliberate re-engagement and pro economic thrust in President Mnagagwa's Government&period; Already&comma; he said&comma; the group registered growth in the festive season and also in the first two months of 2018 compared to last year&period;

"Christmas was very good&comma; I can say that December was very good&comma; even January was also quite good&period; The last few months has seen "a lot of optimism not only among locals but even foreigners because saw a lot of tourists coming into our city hotels and even in Victoria Falls&comma;" Mr Madziwanyika said&period;

He said the conferencing business had also boomed with government&comma; companies and non-governmental organisation restrategising&period;

"I will give you a very interesting statistic&comma; average growth in tourism per year has been 4 percent&period; In fact last year global tourism grew by 7 percent&period; If you were to look at 7 percent per annum it means if you were compounding your growth at 4 percent&comma; in about 17 years or so you would have doubled&period;

So in other words&comma; if we had been in step with global trends of growth&comma; it means by now we should have doubled our room stock&comma;" said the RTG CEO&period;Mr Madziwanyika said&comma; based on his projections&comma; Zimbabwe could fail to meet room demand in a year&period;

"But as you know&comma; there is literally no investment in terms of brick and mortar&comma; building new hotels and so forth&comma; the investment has been very little&period; What I suspect is that as the year continues&comma; the growth rates will be amazing&period; I think that in about a year it's going to become evident that we may experience constraints in terms of availability of rooms&comma;" he said&period;

"This is why we decided in the meanwhile to also adopt the Air BnB model to say you may not want to stay in a hotel&comma; but you can stay in a house&period; It gives people an opportunity to stay in a house when they fail to get accommodation in a hotel&period;"

To grow the industry's capacity&comma; he said&comma; RTG launched the RTG Gateway&comma; an integrated mobile and internet application which allows users to browse&comma; book and pay for accommodation&comma; meals&comma; and airport transfers among other services&period; RTG has signed up over 200 partners- including 40 houses&comma; 50 lodges and 72 virtual partners - on the platform which comes after another initiative RTG Virtual of 2014&period; By 2017&period; RTG Virtual channelled business worth over &dollar;1&comma;5 million&comma; 10 percent of which comes to the group as commission&period;